The aim of this study is to identify the characteristics of metamodernism as a new cultural paradigm. For this purpose, a comparison of the specifics of the cultural break of the early 20th and 21st centuries will be used. The attitude of these eras to aesthetics as a new force of persuasion, a manifestation of “soft power”, was chosen as the main criterion for comparison. This, in turn, allows us to assess the new role of culture and art in modern processes of social construction. Special attention is paid to understanding how metamodernism not only structures artistic production, but also forms a new anthropology of the subject living in a state of interdimensional oscillation. This approach allows us to consider metamodernism not simply as another aesthetic trend, but as a symptom of deeper shifts in collective sensuality and cultural imagination.
The cultures of modernism and metamodernism reflect fundamental changes in economic and social life. They give rise to those artistic forms that explain these general transformations. Object-centrism, networkedness, visuality are concepts that provide the theoretical basis of modern culture. The resurgence of modernism is reflected in the idea of the art openness. Modern art is filled with experiments with colors, shapes, textures, attempts at their new theoretical explanation in the form of concepts of various "turns of culture". Culture has emerged as a special sphere of constructing the emotional and psychological experience of reality. The collage, quotation, hypertextuality of the culture of modernism and postmodernism are realized in the atmosphere of new sincerity, meta-irony, new sensuality, which came along with the paradigm of metamodernism. The focus is on the relationship between environmental qualities and human states, which provokes a feeling of nostalgia as a sign of a new cultural paradigm. The structure of sensibility captures the moment of birth of a mental image that has not yet grown into a discourse.
Metamodern aesthetics is a new theory of perception and practice of aesthetic work. It is realized in the structure of "nostalgia", not as a reproduction, but as a reconstruction of human experience. This occurs through the construction of the authenticity of space and human identity, as associations with certain experiences, practices, preferences.
Thus, metamodernism uses the cultural archive of modernism and adapts it to contemporary aesthetics, which actively interacts with current social and cultural practices. Attention is focused on the fixation of emotional impact. Both the ontology and the meaning of works of art have changed, which forms the methodological task of art criticism not to describe, but to explain the works of contemporary authors
